Wednesday was our deepest journey yet into the bottom of the Brazilian social pyramid, but the enduring story is our meetings with incredible leaders. We visited Vila Nova Esperança (Town of New Hope) a favela in the far West outskirts of Sao Paulo. During the journey, our surroundings devolved with our transport, from metro train to city bus to foot. As a prelude to experiencing the favela, our contact Miguel (who deserves his own profile) took us to the local recycling facility. Nestled near the end of a line of small shops, this was the last stop for civilization: passable roads, legal electricity, and taller buildings than trees. That is where we meet Antonio.
His appearance was tailor made for the setting. Boasting a laborer muscles lined with 20 years of hard work, he stood proudly and easily among his piles of trash. Antonio was pretty clearly a blue collar success story. He had managed to push himself and his family out of catador economics into the comparative stability and unquestionable success of a small business owner. But our conversation started to uncover further dimensions.
His appearance was tailor made for the setting. Boasting a laborer muscles lined with 20 years of hard work, he stood proudly and easily among his piles of trash. Antonio was pretty clearly a blue collar success story. He had managed to push himself and his family out of catador economics into the comparative stability and unquestionable success of a small business owner. But our conversation started to uncover further dimensions.
Raising a young daughter introduced Antonio to the wealth of educational resources in Sao Paulo. Like a good entrepreneur, he enrolled in a course on business administration. That introduced him to computers and his painfully slow typing, so he enroll in keyboarding. Suddenly faced with the modern world of computers, Antonio's course load grew to include "infomatica" or IT/Computer Science classes. Note, all of this has minimal bearing on his day job running a recycling center, but Antonio definitely has a thirst for knowledge. As a bonus, for the first time, we had an opportunity to add value by sharing information. USP has courses on how to recycle high-value e-waste? "Do they have classes tomorrow?" Hal Watt started bike recyclers in Africa? "We can use the same technique to recycle our wires!"
The scholarly side of Antonio is one of the distinctive ways he projects personal strength into his environment. He mentions setbacks like R$20,000 spent on a trash compressor that lies idle due to power grid failures. It hardly dims his smile, since he and his wife Teresina run the recycling center effectively enough to provide for the family despite high operating costs. For a man who believes "God comes to us in nature, in words, and in dreams," life on the edge of Sao Paulo features all three.
But for all Antonio's success, his impact on the community remains unclear. The catadores who supply his recycling facility lead very different lives, and Antonio laments that his payments to them will be spent on drugs and alcohol. Attempts to proselytize "evangelical" Christianity have only seen a handful follow his path. During our design synthesis, Antonio shuffles out as more of a highly impressive outlier than a leader. For that, we had to walk on into the favela.
She is the subject of the next profile, Leah.
The scholarly side of Antonio is one of the distinctive ways he projects personal strength into his environment. He mentions setbacks like R$20,000 spent on a trash compressor that lies idle due to power grid failures. It hardly dims his smile, since he and his wife Teresina run the recycling center effectively enough to provide for the family despite high operating costs. For a man who believes "God comes to us in nature, in words, and in dreams," life on the edge of Sao Paulo features all three.
But for all Antonio's success, his impact on the community remains unclear. The catadores who supply his recycling facility lead very different lives, and Antonio laments that his payments to them will be spent on drugs and alcohol. Attempts to proselytize "evangelical" Christianity have only seen a handful follow his path. During our design synthesis, Antonio shuffles out as more of a highly impressive outlier than a leader. For that, we had to walk on into the favela.
She is the subject of the next profile, Leah.